On Friday nights in the 1980s, a mix of age groups would get together and go from pub to pub before splitting off into their own friendship groups and pubs of choice.

“It was good, because the younger ones like us – about 18 or 19 – were with the lads in their mid to late 20s and everyone knew each other,” says Adrian, known by everyone as Travers.

“Some of the older ones used to go Bug Jam, so we started going too, and that’s how I got into Volkswagens.”

“Car freak”

A self-confessed “car freak”, Travers, now 55, cut his motoring teeth on a Mini 850 he bought when he was 16 and was in a real hurry to drive.

“I’d booked my test, but on my 17th birthday I phoned them up and told them I was going in the army abroad and could they get me a test date sooner?” he says. “I got a test that week. I wasn’t going into the army – I was on a YTS at Tooks Bakery – but it was a good way of getting a test!”

Travers then went for a job on a building site wearing a suit and a nice pair of shoes.

“They said to me, ‘there’s a ton of sand in the entrance, if you move it you’ve got the job’, so I shovelled it in, making a mess of my shoes and my suit,” he laughs. “They paid me a bit more than the YTS, or ‘young, thick and stupid’ as they called it, rate of £25 a week.”

After his driving test stunt, Travers also liked to make sure he stood the best possible chance of getting whatever job he went for.

“The Job Centres weren’t online, you went to a shop in the town and you had all the cards on the boards,” he says. “So I used to find the jobs I wanted and take the cards. I’d go back a couple of days later to make sure they hadn’t put them back up again. I always took the job, so I wasn’t doing someone else out of it – they might just not have got as good an applicant as they wanted!”

Savage Cortina and souped up van

But back to the cars and, after the Mini, a 17-year-old Travers had a Mk2 Cortina Savage with a broken engine he bought for next to nothing from the side of the road.

“A friend of mine who was a mechanic knew of a scrapyard up the road with a 3-litre engine, so we chucked that in and drove around like that for a while,” he remembers.

“Then came a Mk4 Escort van with an RS Turbo engine, which I swapped for a Dutton Phaeton 2 with a Fiat Mirafiori engine.”

And then, aged about 20, came his first Volkswagen – a Splitscreen camper without an engine.

“There was a fella called Murray who used to race a really special Beetle at Santa Pod back in the day, and he had a bus they called Strawberry Split because it was a pinky colour,” says Travers.

“Murray’s mechanic said they’d swap it for my Dutton, and I was well up for it. I got the mechanic to build me an engine, which didn’t sound like a VW at all.

100mph splitscreen

“It was a VW engine, but it sounded like a 2-litre Ford Transit, and this little Splitscreen ended up doing 100mph – it would go right off the clock, and the steering had about three inches of play either way…”

The bus, which Travers painted green, was his daily driver, and clocked up a lot of motorway miles before he bought a Bay window crew cab – again without an engine.

“When I had the Splitscreen, I stayed at my mum’s in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, and used to travel backwards and forwards to Essex every weekend in it,” he says. 

“I used it all the time – it was so reliable.”

Travers, a member of the SX Dub Club, was a regular at Bug Jam and similar events, and again utilised his connections to help with getting the crew cab up to scratch.

“All the brakes were full of mud, and Murray’s mechanic sorted them out for me, and chucked an engine in,” he adds. “The next one I had was a ‘55 Beetle that had been hanging up in a barn in Sweden or somewhere, in bits. Someone had put it back together and brought it over, and I bought that. It was running and rolling but needed a bit of work to get it back together.”

Several more campers

Over the years, there were another couple of Bays, a ‘67 Splittie bought and sold back to the same man in Cornwall, and another ‘67 Splittie that, until recently, was sitting in Travers’ garage while he uses his latest buy, a double cab pick up, for the weekend trip to Beetle-Juiced in Suffolk.

After spending two years restoring the ’67 splittie, it was hit by a drunk driver in October 2024.

“It was repairable, but after restoring it, I didn’t have the heart to do it all again, so I sold it,” he says.

Pension pays for double cab pick-up

Travers says he’s spent a large chunk of his pension money on the double cab pick-up.

“I would rather enjoy my money in something I can sell when I’m older,” he adds. “I was trying to find something that I think will always have value.

“The bit that’s worrying me is, when electric cars come in, how difficult are they going to make it for us to drive the petrol and diesel? At what point does that become worthless because fuel is £10 a gallon?

“But with cars, I just can’t help myself. I’m a bit of a car freak really, it seems to have ruled my life more than anything else.”

The pick up is a Swedish import that arrived in the UK about five years ago and headed to Exeter.

It arrived at Travers’ home at about 1am on the Sunday morning before the Suffolk show, because “the fella delivering it didn’t get out of bed in time and left four hours late…”.

Having passed over a few single cab pick ups he didn’t think were worth the money, Travers saw this one advertised and jumped at the chance.

“Don’t buy it” – he bought it

“On this one you could see all the underneath, the welding, and you could see them doing it on the photos,” he says. “I thought ‘OK’, and it just clung to me. I sat there and thought ‘you shouldn’t be doing this, don’t buy it’, but it just wouldn’t go away.”

Powered by a 1641cc engine that will soon come out and be rebuilt, there have been a few teething problems in Travers’ first week of ownership.

“It turned up with oil all over the trailer, so I thought I’d better go and see how bad it is, so I went for a short drive,” he says. “There was no oil, then a longer drive, no oil. I put a board under it – no oil Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, then I got home on Thursday – a big puddle of oil.

“I was a bit miffed. I don’t understand why it’s dropping oil when it’s cold, so that’ll need to be sorted.”

As will a suspected fuel issue that manifested itself on the journey from Essex to the show at Jimmy’s Farm near Ipswich.

“I stopped for petrol and it didn’t really want to start again,” he says. “I somehow caught up with my friends, and they pulled over for me, so as I was approaching I pulled down the slip road and the van started spluttering.

“I got it going and carried on driving, then slowed down to 30mph and it just cut out.”

He made it in the end, and the pick up started up fine for the short drive to our photoshoot.

“I’m just going to love it”

Other than sorting the engine out, what other plans does Travers have for the van?

“I’m just going to love it, that’s what I’m going to do,” he says. “It’s got all the original de luxe interior in it, which is pretty rare. I’ve put blankets over the seats, which have rips in them.

“I don’t think I’m going to find somebody who can re-cover them like they should be, so I’ll just leave them and make sure they don’t get any worse.”

But more than anything, Travers is hoping to enjoy the Volkswagen scene like he always has done.

“I’m hoping that the VW scene picks up a little bit, because back when I was younger it was a great thing to be in,” he says.

“I think now the values are all over the place, some people have become money oriented and you get stitched up.

“I’m getting older now and I want to do something with my free time, I want to enjoy myself and go and party with my friends.”

The post Travers’ mint Volkswagen pick-up appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

Back in the ‘80s, her then husband had refused to spray her Mk2 Ford Escort pink because, he said, it would devalue it.

“It was done up to look like a rally car, but you could start it with a screwdriver,” she says. “I wasn’t sure how you could devalue a car that would start with a screwdriver…”

But then Odette, a learning disability nurse, spotted a tatty red and black Beetle looking sorry for itself at the children’s home where she worked in Hastings.

“The doors were hanging off, and the battery was on the floor,” she remembers. “It was owned by a 16-year-old at the home, one of six siblings who were there.

‘Can that be pink?’

“He had bought it to do up, but he obviously hadn’t been able to do it. So I said to my other half, ‘what about that? Can that be pink?’ And that’s how it started.”

She paid £150 for the 1970 Beetle 1500, which was just about running but had no MoT and was “a bit of a mess”.

Her husband, a mechanic, got to work restoring the Beetle, including some slightly dubious methods.

“We repaired it with metal road signs, because he didn’t realise you could buy the panels,” says Odette, chatting at the Beetle-Juiced festival in Suffolk.

“It was first restored in a light pink with glitter in a lacquer, so it was sparkly. I didn’t buy it because it was a Beetle – I just bought it so it could be pink.”

The work began in 1989 and on June 24, 1990 Odette and her best friend threw a tent in the back and headed from Hastings to Bug Jam at Santa Pod in Northamptonshire.

She had already joined the Sussex VW Owners Club, so it’s fair to say the Volkswagen bug had already bitten hard.

“It became law that we went to Bug Jam, because that was the first thing we ever did,” she says. “We’ve been there most years since.”

New ‘hot pink’ paintwork

And most of those journeys have been made in the same pink Beetle, although these days it sports more vivid, ‘hot pink’ metallic clothing, the legacy of a fourth restoration in 35 years a few years ago.

“It’s hard to explain what the car means to me,” says Odette, sporting pink hair for the festival. “I think it’s quite nice that I’ve managed to keep it this long, kept it on the road and kept it in the condition it is.”

Back in the ‘90s, when Odette moved along the coast to Shoreham, she helped set up a local branch of the Sussex owners club.

“The club was set up by someone in Hastings and, in the winter, getting there from Shoreham on the back roads was really hard in a Beetle,” she says, “so we set up an offshoot so that people could meet locally.

Beetle fundraising

“We used to do lots of fundraising things, like car treasure hunts, and we decorated the car like Mr Blobby with yellow plastic vinyl spots.”

Over the years the Beetle was twice restored by her former husband, both times painted the same baby pink, and once requiring a new bonnet.

“When I went up to London to get it, I realised I couldn’t get it in the car, so I bungee strapped it to the bonnet and drove home,” says Odette. “That’s the sort of thing you can do with that sort of car.

“After one of the restorations, a friend said they’d get some number plates made up, but they had them done with 282 and not 288, so we had to get that changed.”

After a while, Odette was keen to sleep in something other than a tent on her travels.

“A lot of people went from Beetles to campers as they progressed through, but I can’t get rid of my Beetle, It’s part of me,” she says. “So the next best option was the teardrop caravan, which is so light you can tow it with a motorbike.

“I thought that with a 1500cc engine I could easily tow it, although on a hill we can slow down to about 30mph.”

Volkswagen community

She says she became so heavily involved with the Volkswagen scene for its sense of community.

“It’s the whole atmosphere,” she added. “It doesn’t matter who you are or how old you are, everybody gets on, and everybody helps each other out. With mine, if it broke down, somebody would always help me out.

“After my marriage broke down, I did get a camper with my daughter. We used to go to Belgium and France as a club, and one time she couldn’t come.

“I wasn’t keen on going without her, but the club members said ‘come on’. We got to Dover and as we were going on the ferry, the clutch cable snapped, and I was ‘right, this isn’t meant to be, I’m not going’.

“They said ‘yes, you are’, and they towed me on to the ferry, got to the other side and fixed it in a lorry car park. I suppose that’s just the fun of it all.”

The Beetle has also been overseas, to France, where the club met up with a Belgian club and were led by police motorbikes on a convoy.

But about six years ago, it was clear that something needed to be done about the Bug, which was starting to show signs of its 50 years.

Something had to be done

“It had been bodged up when we first did it,” says Odette. “We hadn’t really restored it properly, and it got to a point where there was rust coming through on the roof and something had to be done with it.

“So I drew some of my pension out – my private pension isn’t worth much – and thought ‘I’m going to restore it, and enjoy it now’.”

The Beetle now looks better than ever, although Odette did have misgivings about the colour switch from pale pink to ‘hot pink’.

“I took it to a guy called Steve at Aingers Green, who is brilliant with bodywork, and he persuaded me to have it that colour,” she says. “I said ‘no, it’s always been light pink’, but he said ‘that’s a bit old school now, let’s do something more modern’.

“He mixed the paint up, so it’s the only one sprayed that colour.”

As well as the paintwork, the original seats were treated to a reupholstery and retrim in pink and black, while a reconditioned 1500cc engine with twin carburettors and electronic ignition replaced the original unit.

“It starts a lot better now,” says Odette, who now lives near Clacton in Essex, “and it doesn’t pink like it used to. At the time, we put it down to Shell petrol – I thought if I filled it up with Shell petrol it pinked, but it wasn’t that, it was just the engine. It’s lovely to drive now.”

SSP wheels also replaced the originals, which Odette had wanted to keep but they were beyond economic repair.

Since then, the Beetle has continued to be used for local club meetings and shows, and Odette has had to get used to the attention created by the new colour.

Attention grabber

“Everyone waves at you,” she says. “When we’re going down the motorway or dual carriageway people will slow down and drive beside us. And it’s like woah, they didn’t do it when it was the previous colour. And when we’ve got the teardrop behind it, everyone’s ‘wahaay’.

“If we go to the Clacton car show and things like that, I think it’s the most photographed car because all the children go ‘look, there’s a pink car’.”

So what does the future hold for a car that clearly means so much?

“I’ll keep it going,” says Odette. “If I couldn’t do the shows I wouldn’t be very happy – it means a lot to me.

“My 10-year-old grandson says to me ‘I’m having it next, aren’t I?’ I say ‘but you’re going to hot rod it aren’t you?’.

“‘No, no, no, I’ll leave it like that’. So it’s in my will to him, because he’s promised he’ll look after it.”

The post Odette’s Beetle pretty in pink appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

But when he met Andy Finch, known as ‘Spike’, who had a passion for air-cooled Volkswagens, a whole new world opened up to him.

“He was into Volkswagens and he took me to my first show, and ever since then I just fell in love with them,” says Baz, now 52 and director of a cargo handling company.

“We started off mainly going to Bug Jam, back when the Prodigy were there, and the Beetle Bash. I enjoyed the racing and the partying.”

In the early days, Baz didn’t have his own Volkswagen or even a driving licence, eventually getting a red Vauxhall Viva, followed by a chocolate brown Vauxhall Chevette and an MG Metro Turbo.

“When I met my wife, Cat, she had a Beetle and used to go to the shows before I did, so she was ahead of the game compared to me,” he says.

Own Beetle at last

Baz was in his late 20s when finally got his own Beetle, and it was very much a family affair, a 1500 that his grandad bought new in 1967.

“The deal was, I was always going to get that car, so when he passed away it came to me,” he says. 

“Felixstowe is full of Volkswagens, and everyone around me had them, so once I got it I wanted to follow suit and put my own little stamp on it.

“It was absolutely stock when he had it – he only ever used it to go to bingo. But as soon as I got it, it was in the garage and stripped, and I just went full hog on it.

“I needed to replace all the wings, because he used to feel his way into the garage, not drive in.

“The paint had a blowover, and a retrim on the interior – the inside paint is original – and I put on some Porsche 912 alloys.

Changes for the better

“Grandad may have turned in his grave, but the changes were definitely for the better.”

Baz and the Beetle were regulars at shows, and he still owns the car today, but it’s another VW that he’s brought to the Beetle-Juiced festival in Suffolk for the weekend – and it’s really pretty special.

The 1963 Beetle convertible came to England from California in early 2020, and Baz was in prime position to take advantage.

“As I work in the import and export industry and handle loads of cargo, all of my mates tend to import their cars through our warehouse,” he says.

“Spike had said to me ‘I’ve got a couple of cars coming in a container, can you handle them for me?’ ‘Yeah, no problem’. As soon as I unloaded this one, I rang him and said ‘is the convertible yours?’ He said ‘yep’, and I said ‘not any more…’

“He came down that afternoon, we cracked a deal for the car and the restoration, and the next morning it was put on a car trailer and taken to his workshop, and then completely nut and bolt stripped.”

Not that the car was a mess, far from it.

“It was perfect, in really good condition, but completely stock,” says Baz. “It had the same colour roof as now, but the paint was more like a British Racing Green, with standard wheels. It was a pretty car, but not my sort of taste.”

Spike gets to work

With the Beetle at Spike’s workshop at Spike’s Vintage Restoration, Baz gave him the spec he wanted and more or less left him to his own devices, checking in at various stages of the build if a decision was needed.

With the car stripped down to bare metal, one of those decisions was the colour.

“When you’re restoring a car you think the colour choice is one of the easy decisions, but it actually isn’t – it’s what makes or breaks it,” he says.

“I was going to go for Beryl Green, but it’s just been done so many times, so I thought I’d flip it and go for Manila Green, which was a MkI Golf colour.

“It was quite a standard colour for the day, but a bit of a brave move. I just thought it needed to be something a little bit different, something that no-one had done before.

“In the end I think it’s come out well – I was over the moon with it.”

When they started the engine, Baz thought it already sounded “a little bit throaty”.

Engine overhaul

“We didn’t know what it was, but when it went away for a stripdown and health check I was told it had got cams in it,” he says. “I had it bored out to 1776cc, we put on some twin 40 carbs, and added a handmade exhaust that replicates a Porsche 356.”

The Beetle was fitted with a new wiring loom, an air-ride system from Dutch-based DogBack-Beam, a replacement steering wheel, and Porsche Fuchs replica wheels with original centre caps.

A new hood was handmade by a former Bentley employee, complete with Bentley Corniche-style wool on the inside, while Kent-based 13 Stitches worked on the car’s interior.

Again taking inspiration from the MkI Golf, Baz opted for chequered seats.

‘A bit of chav’

“I wanted to flip it so it’s got a little bit of a Burberry feel – a bit of chav in there,” he laughs. “It’s still mostly period, but with a bit of a fresh twist to it.”

Spike worked on the project throughout the Covid period, mostly in splendid isolation while most of the country was in and out of lockdown, and it was finished towards the end of 2020.

Baz has plenty of other cars to choose from, including a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S, BMW M2, and Volkswagen Amarok, so the Beetle was never going to be a daily driver.

“We use it as a weekend car, for family picnics if it’s a nice day, or we’ll go to local shows or car events,” he says. “Sometimes, if it’s nice we’ll cruise around town and the seafront in it and just enjoy the ride.”

The convertible attracts plenty of attention on these days out.

“Obviously when I’m driving, I don’t notice it, but I do enjoy parking it up and moving away from the car and letting people just hog all over it,” says Baz.

Different, and cool

“People like it. Whether you like Volkswagen Beetles or not, I think people just appreciate something different and something cool, something clean that’s old. It does get some nice reactions, especially from the older generation – they know what it is. It’s nice to see.

“Some people don’t seem to understand the air ride element of it and just look at it in disgust – how on earth do you drive that thing? They don’t realise you can raise it.”

Here at Beetle-Juiced, Baz is among his people, a scene he joined 35 years ago and shares with Cat and children, son Alfie and daughter Daisy.

“Everyone here’s on the same vibe, everyone’s cool, and everyone’s interested in things, whether it’s a show car or not,” he says, “and that’s the kind of passion I like.

“You respect the fact that people love their cars – it doesn’t have to be a show car, it’s about the person that drives it as opposed to the car itself.

“We’ve always brought the kids. Alfie’s now 18 and he’s been coming to the shows ever since he was a babe. In fact, for his first show he was still in his mum’s tummy, and now here he is on a weekend with his dad with his own little car.”

The post Volkswagens a family affair for Baz appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

Back then, it had 90,000 miles on the clock, and only covered a few thousand more before Frances’ untimely death in 1995.

“The only good thing was that I got my car back,” says Les, already a staunch VW enthusiast. “At the time I had a company car, which was a boring heap of junk.”

Over the past three decades, the 82-year-old grandfather-of-eight has driven the Beetle an average of nearly 12,000 miles a year – and that’s before you add in trips in his ‘64 Karmann Ghia convertible and the red ‘70 Beetle that was originally his daughter Elizabeth’s.

“I’ve been everywhere in it, including trips to France, Ireland, and Scotland,” he says. “It was always there, and it would always start, bom, go. For something of that age, that’s a lot of driving.

Modern cars? Boring

“Modern cars are totally alien to me. There are too many buttons, and too many controls – I’m not interested. I find them really quite boring cars.”

Les cut his motoring teeth on an NSU Quickly moped, taking it from his home in Bournemouth the 90 miles to university in Exeter, where he studied chemistry.

He graduated to a BSA Bantam and then a Villiers-engined DMW 325 twin, on which he travelled 6,600 miles in five weeks on a tour of Greece and Yugoslavia in 1965.

“It was a bit grim because it was very grey, and very communist,” he remembers. “But the whole thing cost me £90 including fuel and insurance.”

Les bought his first car, an Austin 7, for just £2, moving on to a Ford Popular before getting his first Beetle after completing a chemistry PhD in London.

“It was a white ‘60s Beetle and I took it over from my dad, and had it until it just about fell apart,” he says.

“It was so simple, and the roadholding was very good, provided you got used to the fact that it was rear wheel drive.” And rear-engined, of course.

Les and Frances, who were married in 1971, had three children – Elizabeth, Tom, and Chris – and he bought a Bay Window camper for family holidays to Wales, Scotland, France, and Germany.

His career took him to Norwich to work for chemical company May & Baker, via stints in Dagenham and Ongar, and he remembers owning a Rover P3 before he was offered a company car.

Beetle runabout

In 1980, he bought the Diamond Blue – paint code L50B – Beetle convertible for Frances to use as a local runabout.

“It had done a fair mileage, and it needed attention because it had not been looked after properly around the heater channels, which form part of the chassis,” he says. “After that it was just regular maintenance.”

That was, until about 10 years ago, when Les decided to up the ante with an extensive engine rebuild and an increase to a 1776cc block, twin Empi carbs, and a larger oil cooler, which all added up to about 90bhp.

The reason? “Because I like the fun of driving a Beetle quickly,” he laughs. “It was like shit off a shovel. I ran it in very carefully, but after that you could hear when you put your foot down that this was not an ordinary Beetle engine. It is very pokey and a joy to drive.

“It’s quite amusing when some road hog comes up too close behind you and you just put your foot down – gone.

‘You can hear it coming’

“And you can hear it coming! I remember one time my son had broken down in his 2-litre Mondeo somewhere between home and Peterborough, and I happened by chance to be going along that road.

“He heard this engine coming, and as I drove along I could see him waving me down. I towed his Mondeo behind that engine for about 80 miles, in third most of the time, pulling twice as much weight.”

Les remembers a couple of other notable journeys, including a trip to France with a girlfriend in about 2016, from Normandy down to the Loire Valley and back up to Calais.

“We got back home and the engine stopped and I couldn’t get it going again,” he says. “I suspect something went into one of the carb jets.”

Then there was a 430-mile trip to see a cousin in Stirling in Scotland in 2019.

“On the way back I felt that I was having to put the clutch pedal down a bit far to release the clutch, and I thought ‘I’ve got a thread or two loose on the clutch cable’,” he says.

“So I drove it all the way back, as much as I could, without changing gear, and I got back home and I had six strands of the wire left on the cable.”

The second longest-serving member of Les’s three-car garage is the red Beetle that he bought for Elizabeth in the mid ‘90s.

Beetle number 2

“She took the car to university with her, and had it when she was living with her husband in South West London,” he says. “She loved it, but the trouble was it was parked on the road and in the end she said ‘you can have it back now, I’ve destroyed it’. 

“By the time I got it back about 16 years ago I had to spend £7,000 to get it back into the state it is now, with a respray and some mechanicals and electrics.”

It now needs another respray, but the wet winter and Les’s soggy garden put paid to that.

“It was going to be resprayed this winter, but I couldn’t get it out,” he says. “The car just sank into the grass, it was awful.

“It’s solid, it just needs a bit of care on the appearance, but it still goes incredibly well on a standard 1500cc original engine.”

Karmann Ghia convertible

Les’s most recent acquisition is the Karmann Ghia convertible, originally from San Diego but since converted to right hand drive, bought in 2019 for £19,000.

“The chap I bought it from was a bit of a shark, and I found a lot of things wrong with it, basic faults, so I went over with a fine-toothed comb when I got it home,” he adds.

“I had to have it sprayed, because it was not as good as I’d have liked. It’s not an original Karmann Ghia colour, but it was used on other VW cars of the same age.”

The Karmann was given a thorough workout on its biggest journey to date, a trip to the Isle of Man with Les’s son Tom in 2021.

“It was a memorable journey getting to Liverpool – it rained all the way,” he says. “We were dry, but my God did it rain and you’ve got a car that’s about 50 odd years old in that weather, as convertible and with the old windscreen wipers. It was grim – we thought it would never stop.”

Les and Tom did the trip with another 50 or so Karmann Ghias, spending a week on the island and completing the obligatory trip around the TT course.

“My God, up in the mountains you can’t see much, it was very misty,” he says. “All the trees have got what looks like the casing you put round the boiler, painted red or yellow so you can see them. I wouldn’t like to go round that course at 200mph on a motorbike, it’s hairy.

“We did all the usual things, went to see the mines which are water driven, and drove all around the island from the very north to the very south.”

Sorry-looking Beetle

There is one other Volkswagen lurking on Les’s driveway, a sorry-looking Beetle that has been cannibalised for parts for his other cars.

“Tom’s father-in-law found the car semi-abandoned in Lyme Regis, and we got it for a couple of hundred quid and towed it here,” he adds. “I’ve since taken bits of bodywork, bits of electrical equipment, and an axle among other things. I can’t actually remember all the things that have ended up in the three different cars.”

It doesn’t take Les long to say which car of the three means the most to him.

“I think the blue Beetle, because I’ve had it so long and I’ve done so many miles in it,” he adds.

“After I’m gone I think that car and the Karmann Ghia will go to one each of my sons, but I don’t think my daughter wants her Beetle back. She’s got quite a big Skoda, which I wouldn’t be seen dead in. I don’t consider that a VW, even though I know it technically is.”

Author’s note: A few weeks after we visited Les, he sadly passed away on August 7, 2024, aged 82. His daughter, Elizabeth, has asked for the article to be published, and said that “his cars were his pride and joy”.

The post Les’s 450,000-mile Beetle still going strong appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

That all changed five years ago when a mate with a Caddy van persuaded him to sell his BMW M240 and join him in owning a van.

“He kept hassling me, ‘sell your car, get a Volkswagen’, so eventually I did,” says Lee, 44, a lorry driver from Braintree in Essex.

“In the past I‘ve had a BMW M5 and an Audi S3 running 400bhp, and I was always putting my foot down and doing a few track days. But you can’t really go fast anymore anyway, so that spoils it, and the roads aren’t exactly the best.”

Practical Caddy Maxi

The former British Gas Caddy Maxi he bought for £8,200, with its 1.6-litre diesel engine, is certainly more sedate than those road rockets, but it’s also far more practical.

“I’ve always been into camping and gone to car shows all over the country with mates,” says Lee, as well as trips to watch truck racing at Brands Hatch, Snetteron and Thruxton.

“I’d sleep in a tent, which is a bit cold, so I set out to find a Caddy I could convert into a camper.

“By coincidence, I was on holiday in Norfolk and I found this one for sale in Dereham, just down the road from where I was staying.

“It already had the air suspension on it, but it was just a bare van on the inside because the owner used to do motocross stunts all over the place, and he’d put his motorbike in the back.”

Lee had other plans, and commissioned Thetford-based Van Furniture to construct a bed unit with made-to-measure cushions.

Home from home

“The aim was to camp in it and go to a lot more shows, so I wanted to make it as nice as possible inside,” he says, adding carpets, sound deadening, insulation, and a diesel night heater that draws fuel from the tank and blows warm air through the vents in the centre console.

“It’s one little heater underneath the seat, but it heats the whole van up and makes a lot of difference. I can control it all with my phone.”

With sleeping accommodation in place, Lee has been all over the UK, as well as a trip to the Le Mans Classic, “a really good weekend”, and has nine VW shows booked in for 2024.

“I’ve got more into the VW scene,” he says. “It’s very relaxed. You go to other car shows and they can be a bit rowdy, but the VW crowd are more chilled out.

“Everyone just gets on, has a good laugh, and helps you out and. At Dubs in the Middle it was a bit of a mudbath, but everyone was helping pull or push each other out, getting covered in mud.

“I’ve got to know lots of people through VWs and, if we’re not going to a show, we’ll just go camping somewhere.”

Show van

Over the years, Lee has done far more than just put a bed in the 2011 Caddy, which has clocked up a fairly modest 91,000 miles.

“I’ve slowly been building it up to turn it into a show van, and I’m always adding bits to it,” he says.

The roof lining and door cards are retro Golf GTi fabric, while the Mk5 Golf GTi seats he had installed were swapped out for a pair of £1,000 wingback aftermarket seats flown over from America.

A Mk7.5 Golf R front bumper has been plastic welded to the existing Caddy / Touran bumper for a new look, one of the only parts of the van that doesn’t wear its original LT5B British Gas blue paint.

“It’s all original paint apart from the front bumper, bonnet and two front wings,” says Lee. “If you look very closely you can see a shadow of where the British Gas stickers were.”

While the engine is a standard diesel, it has been remapped for a little added power, and Lee has added some Rotiform wheels wearing 215/35/19 rubber, and aftermarket headlamps.

“I’ve not looked back,” he says. “I’ve enjoyed it, and I just want to do more to it. There’s always more I can do – it’s never-ending. 

“I want to fit bigger brakes, six-pots on the front, just for show reasons really, and bigger brakes on the back, but that’s another few grand.

“You can’t take it with you”

“I’ve gone further than I thought I was going to do, but I’ve got nothing else to spend my money on, and you can’t take it with you!”

So far, the Caddy has won “a couple of little cups”, says Lee.

“We all try to put our vehicles into the shows, but there’s so much competition out there, and they don’t tend to do a Caddy category.”

Trophies or not, Lee plans to keep hold of the van for some time.

“I’ve put too much money into it now,” he smiles. “I wouldn’t get my money back on it. It’s valued at £12,500 now, but I’ve spent more than that on it. You get your enjoyment out of using it, and I’m looking forward to doing a bit more to it.

“Ideally, I’d like a newer, larger van, but you’ve got to spend silly money to get the lower mileage ones.”

The post Lee’s converted British Gas Caddy a labour of love appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

Behind us, Mark Seward’s ‘61 Volkswagen Firebus is posing for photos on the grass, and attracting plenty of interest from the morning strollers.

One man asks if he can take pictures for his partner, who was interested in all the little bits of period detail on the bus, which originally served in Berlin.

‘Love your van’

“We get that quite a bit,” says Mark. “When we take it to a car boot sale, we probably get 10 people come up and say ‘love your van, and can we take photos of it?’”

It’s easy to see why, because the bright red bus remains in pristine condition despite being restored more than a decade ago by its previous owner Steve Brooker, star of the History Channel’s Mud Men.

Famed for unearthing treasures from the Thames mud, Brooker toured the UK and Europe in the Firebus for family holidays and VW shows before putting ‘Burnie’ up for sale in autumn 2023

And Mark, who has been in the Volkswagen scene since the ‘90s, couldn’t resist, even though he already owned a ‘66 Splitscreen camper and a very rare ‘55 oval window European model ragtop Beetle.

All three vehicles have been bought within the past year or so.

‘Too good an opportunity’

“I lost my mother, so I got some inheritance money, and I think they’re quite a good investment,” he says. “Although you don’t often make a profit when you sell them, they hold their value and when the fire engine came along it was too good an opportunity to miss.

“I’d seen a couple of fire engines at shows and I’ve always wanted one. I like novel, quirky things, and it was always my second dream after owning a Samba.”

He’s yet to realise the Samba dream, but the advert for ‘Burnie’ promised “hassle-free” motoring from the original 1500cc engine that has covered a mere 33,000 miles.

“We visited London and saw Steve, and it sold itself just by looking at the condition of it,” says Mark, 54. “We drove it back from London and it drove very well. It’s smooth, and the gears are nice and easy.”

The van’s looks are far from skin deep, with custom insulated panels, interior metalwork coated with Dynax UC wax, and the exterior cavities protected with Dynax S-50.

Built to last

It was a restoration built to last.

The single-port engine is fed by twin 40 Dellorto carbs, joined to a CSP stainless steel exhaust, while the interior has been adapted to carry six passengers and sleep two on a bed beneath a beautiful cantilevered wooden roof.

The interior is dotted with a combination of period fire-fighting signage and some more modern signs added by Mark, who has also bought a period firehose and other bits and pieces.

He says the sirens do work, but he’s loath to switch them on.

“Steve told me he put the sirens on, but it took at least 20 minutes to get them turned off, so I don’t want to risk it,” he smiles. “I haven’t tried the light yet, but I understand you’re supposed to have it covered up if you’re driving around.”

It seems unlikely, however, that anyone would mistake the Firebus, which would have originally carried powder (‘pulver’) extinguishers, for a modern-day fire engine.

Mark originally got into the Volkswagen scene long before he owned one, camping in tents at shows including Big Bang, Bug Jam, and his favourite, VW Action.

‘Chilled atmosphere’

“I just loved the chilled atmosphere and how cool it was,” he says, running through various cars including his first, an Opel Commodore, before buying his first VW camper at the age of 30 – controversially at the expense of a new kitchen.

“Instead of buying a new kitchen, I took out a loan for something like £12,000 and bought a ‘72 Westfalia bay window,” he says. “I got in trouble, but that’s what I did…”

Since then, Mark has owned about 10 campers, including four or five Splitscreens, and an assortment of Karmann Ghias and Beetles, including the original Thump Thump Targa bug created by Jay Townsend.

“You have a Volkswagen, you sell it, and then you miss it straight away,” he says. “I don’t think there’s been hardly any period of time that I haven’t had a VW of some type.”

Over the years, the VW shows increasingly became a family affair, as one child at the time he bought his first camper eventually became five.

“They were all brought up with it, and they’d sleep under the awning attached to the van,” he remembers. “They’re all grown up now and not into VWs in a massive way, but they like going to shows and seeing different things.”

Car boot Firebus

Since buying the Firebus, Mark and his partner Silvia have mostly used it for car boot sales and shows – we first bumped into them at the Beetle-Juiced show in Suffolk – where they sell an assortment of autojumble and artwork.

“I’ve got lots of original sales brochures from the ‘50s and ‘60s, plus books, and Silvia is an artist,” he says, “and she’s sold some paintings of the bus and other VW artwork.”

Mark has also driven it to work at the local high school where, until July 2024 when he decided to leave teaching, he was head of business studies.

“I parked it at the back out of the way but, when you tell the students, they all come out and have a look,” he says. “It was well received.”

And with the bus added to the Splitscreen camper and Beetle, Mark and Silvia have decided to go into the wedding hire business.

“I did some wedding transport about five years ago, before Covid, in another nice camper I had and, without doing any social media and just through word of mouth, it ticked over and got a few bookings,” he says.

VW wedding hire

“Now, with a fleet of three very different vehicles, we can offer different things to different people. We can offer his and hers, so they could have the fire engine and the camper or Beetle.

“As well as that, I DJ as a sideline – I’ve done it since university – so I could combine that with the transport. I could set up my equipment, pick up the bride and bridesmaids, and then get to the reception to DJ afterwards.”

With the pressures of teaching no longer a factor, Mark will have plenty more time to drum up business, attend car boots and shows, and generally run around in a choice of three great vehicles.

“I need to juggle using the three, because I’ve hardly used the Beetle recently,” he says. “But I think we’re going to take the Firebus to BusFest and Skeg Vegas this summer.”

No doubt there will be plenty of waves, thumbs up and hoots en route, as this historic fire engine seems to attract attention wherever it goes.

Check out some of the great detail in Mark’s Firebus in our gallery below.

The post Mark’s historic Firebus an attention grabber appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

With a wry smile, he remembers his first Beetle, a 1969 car in bright green he bought when he was 17.

“It was the biggest pile of rubbish I could ever have bought,” he says. “It was full of chicken wire, filler, newspaper, and it failed the MoT miserably, but I loved it dearly.

“It should have been my last Volkswagen, because it didn’t go anywhere without breaking down, but from then on I got hooked.”

Over the years, there have been periods when real life has got in the way of Danny’s VW obsession, but now he’s back with a 1962 double-door Splitscreen van imported from Texas in September 2023.

“I had progressed in my job where I had to travel quite a lot, and it was just too much to do everything,” he says. “But my sons are 16 and 22 now and I thought it’s a good time to get back into the VWs.

“Life’s too short”

“Life’s too short, I’ve lost too many friends already, and you understand when you get to 50 that it’s not like when you were aged 10 to 18 when you thought you’d live forever.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to get a van and do some shows this year’, my son’s old enough to come with me, have a few beers, enjoy ourselves and meet up with some old friends.”

We’re chatting at the Alive and V-Dubbin (AVD) festival at Haughley Park in early June, and Danny is here with his elder son Niall.

“I did the very first one of these at Stonham Barns, then it moved to Jimmy’s Farm and now here because it’s grown and grown, and that community spirit is amazing,” he says.

“It’s a weird and wonderful cult type community where everybody goes to a field, doesn’t wash for a weekend unless you’ve got an actual proper van, you drink beer, you talk rubbish, you reminisce.

“There’s no trouble, you can bring your kids, everyone’s chilled, and that’s what it’s all about.”

Danny’s Beetles

Partly thanks to that first experience with the ‘rubbish’ Beetle, Danny learned how to do his own mechanics, and bought a ‘68 Beetle, this time in black with a gold roof.

“That was really cool,” he remembers, but not as cool as the next one, a show-winning Karmann Cabriolet Beetle.

“Me and my dear friend at the time did that up, and we won a number of shows with it. It was totally Cal Look with a low stance, and everything was mint.

“In those days my wife Claire stayed at home with the kids, I’d do three or four weekends away maximum, and that was my escape – my friends, and my community.

“Claire would come along on the Sunday with the boys for show and shine, but it was generally my getaway with my mates.”

A few years ago, in one of Danny’s Volkswagen-free periods, he bought a Porsche Cayman 3.2S.

“I had a mid-life crisis,” he laughs. “That was great fun, but it was going to cause me trouble, I thought I was going to lose my licence at one point.

“In your blood”

“Until I got this van, it was about six years since I’d had my last VW, but once it’s in your blood it’s in your blood, you just can’t get rid of it.”

And so he started looking for something he’d never had before, a camper van, and spotted the ‘62 Splittie, already fitted with air suspension, for sale in Seaham, on the County Durham coast.

“I wanted a panel van or a doored van, but this came up as a double-door, and you very rarely see them,” says Danny, a chief engineer for Openreach from Ipswich.

“It was exactly what I wanted, with a nice patina, and I could leave it anywhere, not like my older cars where they’re all glossy with nice paintwork.

“I went to a show once and I left to go and get some chips and when I came back there was a whole family sitting in my car with the kids jumping up and down on the seats. I thought ‘this is crazy’.

“If somebody did dink this, I don’t think it would be too much of a travesty. It looks absolutely terrible, with the paint sunbleached to death, but it’s solid as a rock and all brand new underneath.”

Danny drove north for more than five hours on a Sunday morning in October 2023 to have a look, and had the vehicle transported home – where it didn’t meet with universal approval.

Splittie divides opinion

“My mum just looked at it and said ‘I don’t know what you did that for’,” he laughs. “My friends across the road from where I live said ‘you spent what on that? Really?’

“Some people look at it as if ‘what on earth is that doing on the road? It shouldn’t be legal’, but others think it’s really cool and love the patina.

“It’s just great – you get all the reactions. Some come past hanging out the window giving the VW sign, and others screw their noses up. It’s a Marmite club, either you like them or you don’t.”

Since getting the van, Danny has been a busy man.

“It was nowhere near what it looks like today, I’ve done lots,” he adds, fitting 44mm twin Kadron carbs to the 1641cc engine, an upgrade kit on the pulley set, electronic ignition, new brakes, and new tyres on Porsche Fuchs alloys.

“I also had the beam narrowed, and it’s been tubbed, so they’ve taken the inside of the wheel arch and moved it in,” he adds. “That’s how you get that narrow look, which I love.”

Cosmetically, Danny has added a number of personal touches, including the German ADAC badge that has been on every Volkswagen he has ever owned.

“I bought it at a car boot sale in 1996, and I absolutely love it,” he says, explaining that ADAC – Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Clubalane – is the German equivalent of the AA or RAC. “That’s followed me wherever I’ve gone. It’s part of me.”

Homemade stencilling

The night before the AVD show, he took some paint and a stencil to the van’s red paintwork.

“I’m a keen shooter, I own a couple of Browning shotguns, so I thought that’d be the thing for me,” he says. “It was an in-between hobby while I was not into the Volkswagens. I had to do something, so shooting clays was the thing of choice. I wasn’t very good at it, but I’m getting better.”

On the inside, the van was already fitted with a rock and roll bed, but Danny is keen to add a proper mattress and seat set up.

One of the van’s first outings was to a friend’s 50th birthday bash in a field in May.

“That was nice because a lot of my friends have still got their Splitties and now I have a Splittie,” he says. “ We had a band in a field and all our Splitties were there, and some T5s and T4s. It was rather cool.

“It was mine and Claire’s first sleep out, and she found it rather cosy, which I was quite surprised by. She said she’d do it again.”

VW’s show debut

This is the van’s proper show debut, just a short trip from Ipswich.

“She drove here lovely, the gearbox is lovely, and I’ve got my tools in there like with every VW,” says Danny. “I’m prepared to stop at the side of the road and fix her. Spark, fuel, air, that’s all you really need.”

Once the summer fun is over for 2024, Danny is planning to add a few more personal touches.

“I thought let’s get some out of it this year, and then we’ll look to see how much I want to spend on it,” he adds.

“I might change a few things, maybe a deluxe kit for the bumpers, freshen it up.”

Having finally got a van, and spent a fair amount on it, there’s little chance of it being sold on.

“I expect I’ll end up buying something newer, but keeping that,” he says. “I don’t think I’d ever get rid of an air-cooled van. What’s the point of getting rid of something if you can afford to keep it? It doesn’t cost anything in tax, insurance is fairly good, and there’s no MoT needed, but I check it myself because I put my children in there.

“Having something like that is a privilege, because I get that not everybody can afford it.”

The post Danny’s 30-year VW obsession appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

As a youngster growing up in 1980s San Diego, California, he would visit his aunt and uncle and see the truck piled high with “boulders, rubbish and tree trunks”.

“I saw the bullet indicators, and I knew that meant it was an early one, and I thought ‘don’t they realise what they have?’” says Chris, now 56 and living in Norfolk. “It was just used for taking stuff to the dump, but by then it was pretty beaten up.

“They’d had it for as long as I can remember, all my life. Before that it was owned by my aunt’s parents, used as a truck for the shop they ran in Upland. I believe it was two or three years old when they bought it.

“You don’t see many of them around, because they did their work and then people got rid of them – they were only meant to last for like five years.”

‘Truck for sale’

Fast forward to 2012, and Chris spotted a post on Facebook from his cousin that said ‘truck for sale’.

“Immediately, I got on the phone to my dad and said ‘they’re selling uncle Steve’s truck, can you get a hold of my aunt Mari and let her know I’m interested?’ he says.

“He immediately came back to me and said she’d save it for me. I bought it for £1,200, and that’s really cheap, but then I had to ship it over, which added probably another £1,800.

“It first went to my grandfather’s house in the US and sat there for a couple of years before I could ship it over here in 2014, when I restored it with some friends from work.”

Chris already had a long association with Volkswagens when he bought the truck.

“At 15 or 16, when you start driving over there, my first car was a Beetle,” he says. “You could pick them up for $50 or $75 and, at one time, my dad and I probably had six of them sitting by the side of the house, using them for parts.

“Then about 30 years ago, when my daughter was born, I had a ‘67 splitscreen deluxe bus. I paid $700 for it, and sold it for $750. I probably should have kept that…”

Avowed Volkswagen fans

Steve and Mari were also avowed Volkswagen fans.

“They bought an SO42 Split Camper off the line in Germany and drove it all over Europe, all over England, and then shipped it back to America,” says Chris, chatting at the Alive & V-Dubbin festival in Suffolk.

“Uncle Steve had lots of different Volkswagens, and he got really into doing work on them with a colleague. Originally, this truck would have had a 1200cc 6 volt engine, but he converted it to a 1600.”

Having married Nicola, an English woman visiting the US, Chris swapped California for England 25 years ago.

“Her stepdad’s brother was the bass player for Iggy Pop, and I was a drummer, and I was introduced to her at the San Diego music awards after party, and that was it,” he says.

“She got homesick and I was up for coming over, and I love it over here. I miss the beach, but Norfolk’s a beautiful place to live.”

The Splittie truck became just a memory of home, until that fateful Facebook post.

A lot of work

“I got it here on June 10, 2014,” he remembers. “It was in a lot worse shape than my dad had let on, and it needed a lot of work.

“The drop sides were kind of like an oval, bent out on the sides from the truck being overloaded with stuff, and people trying to shut it when they probably shouldn’t have.

“Speaking to my cousins, they used to like riding in it, because they could see the road through the cab floor.

“When I got it, the truck was painted ivory – I’d describe it as ivory and rust.”

On the inside, however, the cab was a red colour, and Chris set about uncovering the original paint colour.

“I originally thought it was going to be sealing wax red, but when I got it over here there was a part that I could buff out, and it ended up being this firebus red, which I’m really happy with,” he adds.

“Luckily I work at Lotus Cars in the paintshop, and a couple of guys there, Paul and Shaun, helped me with the restoration. I had it sandblasted and then we started working on it, every day after work.

95% original

“I haven’t replaced any panels, apart from three quarters of the floor in the cab and treasure chest door skin. It’s probably 95 per cent original.”

Chris and his colleagues didn’t hang about, with the truck completed – bar the drop down sides – by the end of September.

“They were a couple of really top guys there at Lotus that sprayed it for me,” he says. “It would have been all red originally, and I liked the idea of the two-tone, so I put the ivory over the top of the firebus red. They’re both 1958 VW colours.”

As well as the paintwork, the seats have been re-covered (“it was a place where rats were living”), new wheel hub caps have been fitted to the original wheels, and a replacement 1600cc engine has been fitted.

The end result, a “stock” look with a standard ride height, has won approval from across the Pond.

“My uncle has sadly passed, but my aunt is still around, and she and my cousins can’t believe it – they’re over the moon with it,” says Chris, who has driven 30,000 miles in the decade since the truck’s restoration.

Well-travelled pickup

“I drive it every week, not all week, but at least once a week,” he says. “I move furniture, do tip runs, go camping. I use it for everything.

“During lockdown, I would go out into a field and get on the back with the drums set up and play them. I still do that to this day.

“I also have a tent that just happens to be exactly the right size to fit on the back, so I pitch that up and sleep on a blow up bed.

“I’ve driven everywhere in it – Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, trying to hit everywhere in the UK.

“Last year (2023), I went to Hannover via the ferry for the VW bus festival put on by VW commercial. They had, I think, 6,000 VW commercial vehicles.”

Nicola is not big into camping, but she’s happy for Chris  – who is at the festival with Kev’s Splitties Group – to indulge his passion.

A lot of VW friends

“I’ve made a lot of friends in the Volkswagen community,” he says, although the pickup is probably more well known than he is.

“It’s funny, people tend to know that truck and know me off of it. Often you’ll be scrolling through Facebook, you’ve been spotted somewhere and a picture appears out of nowhere.”

The truck is also a big hit with Chris’s granddaughter, Mila, who is nearly five.

“I’ve created a seatbelt that goes through her car seat, and she absolutely loves driving in it,” he says.

“Every time I go to get her – ‘are you coming to get me in the truck?’ A couple of weeks ago we were driving and people were flashing their lights, hanging out of the windows waving, and she said ‘do you know them?’ I said ‘no, I don’t know them’.

“Then I showed her the hang loose hand thing, and told her that when you see another Volkswagen, you wave. Then it was ‘is that one?’ She’s waving at almost every van that goes by.”

The irreplaceable truck

So important is the truck to Chris and his family, that talk of its value is entirely academic.

“The very first day out in it, my youngest and I went out to a show and somebody came up and offered me £20,000 straight away,”he says. “I said ‘no, this is not for sale’.

“To me, it’s priceless, irreplaceable, I wouldn’t ever sell it. That truck is staying with me forever.

“It will be passed on to one of my kids, and it will probably be Mila’s one day.”

And the Volkswagen isn’t the only treasured family car that will soon be heading to the UK.

“My parents have my grandmother’s 1966 Mustang that I learned how to drive in and went to the prom in,” he explains. “I’ll be bringing that over next year, hopefully.”

The post Chris’s Splittie pickup a family heirloom appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

He bought the pastel white Type 3, in true ‘time warp’ condition, nearly five years ago, but the memories stretch right back to 1990 and the then 17-year-old’s first car.

“I bought an edition of Volksworld with one red and one yellow Fastback on the front, and I thought ‘I want one of those’,” he says. “I had friends who all had Beetles – but I loved the Type 3 shape, particularly the Fastback.”

He found a Fastback, officially a Type 31, that needed a fair amount of work but, once it was on the road, he’d join his mates on trips out, including to the early years of Bug Jam at Santa Pod.

Unfortunately, after about 18 months, the Fastback was badly damaged in an accident, and was eventually sold on despite Paul’s intermittent efforts to repair it.

Life and more practical cars took over, and Paul drifted away from the Volkswagen scene.

Back in the VW scene

Fast forward to January 2020 when, armed with some money left to him by his grandparents, he found a way back in.

“The one thing I’ve always wanted was to get back into the Volkswagen scene, and I suddenly had the money to do it, which I was very grateful for,” he says.

“I had a look on Car and Classic, not really expecting to find anything because, generally, what you find is a project that you’ve got to invest some money in.

“This car was advertised as a running, driving, MoTd, low mileage UK car. But with all my experience of these cars I thought ‘there’s going to be a horror story under it somewhere’.”

He travelled round the M25 from Ipswich to Little Missenden, near Amersham, to view the Volkswagen, fully prepared to be disappointed.

“I did the usual kind of things, crawled under it, over it, through it, in it,” he says, “but when I lifted back the rubber floor matting I found original sound deadening on the floor pans.

“The bulkhead under the bonnet was not rotted out, there was no rot under the rear gutters and drains, and I just couldn’t quite believe what I was looking at. I asked ‘are you sure it’s a UK car?’ And it was. It was remarkably solid.”

Rotten Fastbacks

It’s no surprise Paul was taken aback, given his earlier experiences with UK Fastbacks.

When he found his first one in a garage in Newport Pagnell, where he grew up, “it was the usual thing, the battery had fallen through the floor”.

“It needed hundreds of pounds worth of welding, but the mechanic I bought it from, a really renowned Volkswagen guy called Ray Bettles-Hill, got it all back to a roadworthy state for me,” he says.

“After the accident, I carted it around with me for a number of years, trying to get bits of it done at a time, but eventually selling it on. In the end, I just couldn’t afford to keep it in storage or move it around anymore.

“After that I bought another couple of Fastbacks and a Squareback, but never in a roadworthy state, and I never managed to get them on the road. It was the usual ‘project in the garage that I’ll get round to one day’, but eventually you need some money and it gets sold off.

“My mum, 30 years later, was phoning me every week saying ‘can you come and get these bits out of the garage you’ve left behind?’”

Original UK car

Paul’s new Fastback could not have been more different, an almost entirely original car with three previous owners and just 40,000 miles on the clock, all backed up by an MoT history.

The car came with a folder of documents dating right back to its first owner, a German called Ernst Kuhn living in the UK who used it to commute to and from the train station.

“I’ve even got a copy of his driving licence and 1970s fuel ration card, everything,” adds Paul, a 51 father-of-three. “After he’d owned it, the car was put in a garage and stayed there for 25 years, before being recommissioned and sold to SR Kinsell, who kept detailed records of everything spent on the car. It then ended up with the lady owner I bought it from, who had it for about five years.”

Paul didn’t fancy tackling the M25 for his first drive, so the car was trailered home to Ipswich.

From there, he drove it up the A14 to Burwell to see Paul Medhurst at Type 2 Detectives.

“I get in it – I’m 18 again”

“It’s one of those experiences where it’s got a particular smell, with the vinyl interior, and you remember the thin steering wheel,” he says. “I get in it and it transports me – I’m 18 again in 1990, watching mechanics at Bug Jam roof-chopping a splitscreen bus over the weekend, with  some crazy stuff going down the strip and seeing the Prodigy live. Every time I get in that car it takes me back to that time.”

Having dropped the car off in Burwell, he had a phone call from Medhurst.

“Once he got it and got stuck into it he phoned me and said ‘I’m surprised you got here because there’s about an inch of gunk laying in the bottom of the fuel tank’,” says Paul.

“He had it for a fortnight and went through it thoroughly, front to back, to ensure that it was solid and safe. It had new discs on the front, a couple of new headlights, and a top end rebuild.

“It needed two pieces of welding, a bumper hanger and a tiny patch on the inner wing. His sign off to me was ‘you’ve got a pretty remarkable car as a survivor story’.”

Paul believes the Fastback’s Pastel White paint is almost entirely original.

“At one point it got damaged in a garage and it had a new windscreen, and I’ve had a detailer look over it who believes the roof might have been resprayed, but everything else is original paint,” he says.

The most basic Fastback

Paul’s car is a 1600TA base model, manufactured after the 1970 facelift that not everyone loves.

“It’s got no stereo, no chrome trim down the side, one wing mirror, one sun visor, and even the surrounds on the indicators are not chromed,” he adds. “It’s the most basic model you can get but it’s a smiles per hour car. It’s not a fast car, but it attracts attention, waves and looks everywhere it goes.

“I joined the ‘don’t hate the late’ Facebook group, referring to the later models. It’s a bit fugly, and people say it’s got a funny face, but I just fell in love with the look.”

While the car is mostly stock, Paul has added a couple of minor modifications.

“I put clear lenses on the front indicators rather than the orange ones, it’s very mildly lowered at the front, and it’s got the replica Porsche Gas Burner wheels,” he says.

“And that’s what people sometimes shout when it’s driving down the road – ‘is it a Porsche?’ because it’s reminiscent of early 911s.

“Because there are so few left, people often don’t know what it is, and if they do have a recollection, it gets called Variant quite a lot, which is obviously the Squareback version, not the Fastback.”

“Best restored car”

Soon after Paul got the vehicle on the road, Covid struck, but he did manage to get the car to a show at Glemham Hall, where it won, “oddly enough”, he says, “best restored car, even though it’s unrestored”.

“The judge had owned them in the past and he said ‘it’s in remarkable condition, I’m so taken with it’. It was pipped to best in show by a Saab 99, which was in equally cracking condition.”

Since then, he has joined the Suffolk Bugrs club, and has taken the Fastback to various local shows, including Beetle-Juiced at Jimmy’s Farm, the East Coast Retros meetings at Shotley, and Alive & V-Dubbin at Haughley Park, which is where we’re chatting.

“It’s not the most comfortable thing for long, long distances,” he says. “Run to the Sun in Cornwall is a great idea, but I’m not sure I want to go that far in it.”

After getting to know Naomi and Andrew, who run the Haughley Park show, Paul volunteered to join the crew and do a couple of shifts over the weekend.

“We brought the car and enjoyed the show, and the following year I got involved with the set-up crew, and I’ve done more and more every year since,” he adds.

Family affair

“Now it’s a family affair with my wife Karen, and eldest son Connor, both volunteering. It’s a great show run by great people, and we always have a really good weekend.”

He’s here with Connor, 24, with teenagers Oscar and Finley, who will get involved with the show next year, set to join him later in the day.

“Those two delight in getting in the back of this, because it’s got no rear seatbelts so they’re sliding up and down the vinyl seat,” says Paul, “plus the fact it’s quite springy and bouncy in the back, a completely different experience for them to anything they’ve been transported in before.”

As for the future, the Fastback will be with Paul for a long time to come.

“That’s a forever car,” he says. “That’s being handed down to children. It’s not one that I want to part with, or would ever think about parting with.

“It’s such a rare find that I don’t have any desire to chop it in for anything else. It would be nice to think that my original one might crop up somewhere, and I’d buy that back in a heartbeat, but I think that’s long gone to a scrapyard, and this is the next best thing.”

The post Paul’s time-warp Volkswagen Fastback appeared first on Dubtales - Classic Volkswagen Stories - Adrian Flux.

They would leave in the evening, when David got home from his job as a bus driver, and drive through the night to the south west.

“I’d fold the middle seat down, put all the cushions down and they would sit however they wanted to sit, or lay down – no seatbelts obviously,” he says at his home in Colchester.

“At some point I’d get tired, pull into a services or at the side of the road, lock the door, lean on the steering wheel and go to sleep, with the kids all over the place asleep in the back.

“I’d wake up in the morning and everything hurts. We’d get on our way again with the kids asking ‘how many cars did you pass, dad?’ ‘Ooh, hundreds of them – they were all parked in the motorway services’.

All about the journey

“They knew that 50mph was fast in that – the journey is what it’s all about, not being there the quickest.

“At 7am, we’d get the Cornflakes out, the milk out of the fridge, put the kettle on and make some tea and toast.”

That was in the late mid to late 1980s and the children have long since grown up – some have their own Volkswagens – but the Devonette Bay window camper remains.

“It’s part of our family history,” says David, 73, “and our eldest Paul said to me recently that he can still remember the smell of the van from those holidays. The kids loved it.”

But when the van was starting to look “a bit rough” on the front end about 15 years ago, David mooted to Suzanne the idea of selling it.

“She said ‘what? If you get rid of the van you’ll cry’,” he adds, “and then she bought me a new front panel for Christmas!”

Long restoration

It was the start of a long restoration that just needs some work on the handbrake and fettling of the engine to get the camper back on the road.

“My daughter Sarah said ‘we’ll all go out when you get it on the road’,” says David. “The four kids and mum and dad, we’ll all go out and make a cup of tea, take some sandwiches and go down to Mersea.”

Born in Colchester, David moved to Chingford for work, and met Suzanne on his first day as a trainee manager at Freeman Hardy Willis shoe shop.

“She was a sales girl, and I fell up the stairs with my giant suitcase, which made her laugh,” he says.

Their first car was a bright yellow Ford Popular 100E, followed by a series of Zephyrs and Zodiacs, a brief dalliance with a VW camper, and then a Cortina that was used for the family’s first trips to Cornwall.

“That was quite amusing,” says David. “In the late ‘70s we had four young children all squashed on the back seat – when one moved, they all moved.”

There was also a Volkswagen Variant Estate, which David remembers for a trip to Longleat to see the lions.

“Because of where the engine is it’s warm at the back, and I remember driving around Longleat on a nice hot day with the boys sitting on top of the engine to get the best view of the lions,” he says.

“We were stuck in traffic, obviously no power blowers for cold air, and the boys all had sweat running down them.”

Large family, more space

It was the couple’s large family, with sons Paul, Steven, and Michael, and daughter Sarah all getting bigger, that prompted David to look for another camper van.

“You need space,” he adds, “and a car doesn’t really fit four growing children.”

He bought the ‘72 Devon, which was then orange with a white roof – the first of many colours – for about £1,100 from a place in Harold Hill.

“At the time it was quite a bit of money, but it was ready to go, a back seat, middle seat, two-ring burner,” says David. “It was my daily driver, every day to and from work, and used for holidays and days out all over the place.”

At the time, he was working for London Transport as a bus driver based in Walthamstow, making the 10-minute trip to the depot in the Volkswagen from his home at Woodford Green.

It was at work when he hit upon the idea of the van’s first of many colour changes.

“I went into the garage at work, saw the painter and said ‘can I have some red paint to paint my motor?’” he smiles. “He said ‘yeah, course you can mate’, and gave me a can of London Transport red paint.

“Parked outside the house where we lived, I got my Black and Decker sander out, sanded down the lower half, wiped it all around, and put some Dulux red undercoat in a roller tray and rollered it all the way around.

First of many colour changes

“Then out came the London Transport red in the roller tray, and I rollered the red on top. On another day, I brush-painted the roof with Dulux white gloss.

“I went to work one day and the foreman said to me ‘oi, you’ve got our paint on your motor’.

“I said ‘no, mate’ – ‘yes it is, I know our paint, don’t you come back in our garage again!’.”

As well as the annual holidays to Cornwall (timed to visit Busfest on the way home), David also took the family from Woodford Green to Suffolk for the RAF Mildenhall Air Fete.

“We’d get out of the bed at silly o’clock, chuck all the stuff in the motor, get the kids in and off we’d go,” he says. “We’d be there by about 7.30am so we were near the front of the queue.”

Disaster struck on one day out to North Weald Airfield, near Epping, when the engine ground to a halt on arrival.

“My brother-in-law towed me back home with his Ford Consul, a metal bar tied to his towbar and connected to the front of mine,” he remembers.

“At times, I got too much speed and couldn’t slow down quick enough, so the only thing to do was move out, and the front of my motor was almost level alongside the back of his car.”

With the van back home, a colleague at the bus depot who also owned a VW camper came to the rescue.

Engine out

“He helped me take the engine out in my next door neighbour’s garage, we took it apart and found that a valve seat had gone, and the valve had sheared off and gone through the piston,” says David.

“We got a new valve seat, a valve and a piston, and he put it all back together. I turned the key, and away it went.”

The camper van was never quite big enough to comfortably sleep six, so over the years it has towed a trailer tent, a caravan (which it didn’t like), and then a folding caravan, all big enough to sleep everyone.

With 100,000 miles already on the clock when he bought it, the weight from towing, and the journey to the south west increased when the family moved ‘home’ to Colchester in 1988, it was perhaps no surprise when the original 1600cc engine finally needed replacing.

“It started blowing lots of white smoke, so I decided I’d get a reconditioned engine from VeeWee, with twin Weber carbs to give it a bit more oomph,” says David.

300,000 miles!

“I can remember we’d had the van for about 10 years and we were travelling from near Perranporth to Newquay and I saw the numbers were going to click over from 99,999, which would have been 200,000 miles.

“So I got my camera out, chugging along and on the tenths now, one knee over the steering wheel, and took the photo as it turned to all the zeros. It’s done another 100,000 now, so it’s up to 300,000.

“In that time, it’s had all sorts in it – three piece suit, bedroom suite, bed headboard, side tables, everything. It’s moved anything and everything, blocks, bricks, other building materials.”

Over the years, David could never quite make up his mind what colour to paint the Volkswagen, the bus red followed by purple, dark green, and most recently a sage green.

“When I rubbed the bodywork down and went right back to metal, you could see all the different colours,” he says.

The current paintwork was applied about seven years ago, by which time the vehicle had been off the road for about eight years, replaced first by a Volkswagen T4 Autotrail and then by a Ford motorhome.

The Devonette used to have a spare wheel attached to the front, which trapped water and caused some rust problems.

Digging reveals plenty of rust

It was saved by Suzanne’s decision to buy a new front panel, but once David started digging, it was clear quite a bit of work was required.

“I took the front panel off, and the floor wasn’t too good in the cab,” he remembers. “Then the front end piece of the chassis was a bit crispy, as were the two outriggers which come up under your feet.

“Then I saw that the chassis rail wanted doing. It was one thing after another, so I went down to Wesbroom Engineering and they cut me the length and width of the bits I needed. They just said ‘give us some tea money’.

“My son Michael did the welding – he practised on my motor, so the front end is not so good but the further back you go the better it gets.”

The front doors were changed, and the sliding side door has a new bottom piece.

“The doors look like they don’t fit, but they do – the new rubber is so rock hard it won’t compress, so I may have to get some softer rubber,” adds David, who retired in March after 47 years on the buses.

One accidental finishing touch is what should have been whitewall tyres.

“We were going to the Isle of Wight one year in the VW motorhome and I saw an advert for whitewall tyres,” he says. “They were down near the Beaulieu museum, so we picked them up on the way back. I don’t know why, but they had some blue on them that protects the white, and I can’t get it off, but my boy said ‘they look a bit green to me, they match your van’. So I’ve got greenwall tyres…”

Daily driver once more

Once the final fettling is done, David is planning on using the van as a daily driver once more, with grandson Oliver set to be one of the first passengers.

“He hadn’t seen it until today,” he says. “It was on the drive this morning when I took him to school. He went ‘ah, can we go in that one grandad?’ Not yet, but soon!”

David admits he is unlikely to make any more pilgrimages to Cornwall (“it’s a long way…”), but is now delighted that Suzanne bought him that front panel for Christmas.

“Oh yeah, she was definitely right,” he smiles. “I’ve restored something to almost what it was, and it was the right thing to keep it.”

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